[Please note that editorials posted in this section are the sole viewpoints of the individual author and do not necessarily represent any collective opinion of the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, or the University of Northampton]

BUESO/LAROUCHE FORUM: 2pm. House of Democracy: Berlin: 17 October 2008

DOES THE LAROUCHE GROUP POSE A THREAT TO INDIVIDUALS AND/OR A DANGER TO SOCIETY?

This Forum aims to raise awareness about the dangers of Lyndon LaRouche and the LaRouchites group. We will also give a voice to all those who suffer because of a failure of our European society to address the legal and ideological issues in question.

Families are failed by a system that does not support them or protect their children from methods of subjugation.

In the case of Jeremiah Duggan, the authorities have thus far preferred to brush a suspicious death under the carpet rather than hear the family’s repeated requests for an investigation into the full circumstances of this violent, tragic and still-unexplained death.

Now, in order to protect the lives of others, for the first time in Germany, former members together with the disaffected families will analyze whether the LaRouchites represent a danger to society, and to European law

For more than 30 years, the LaRouche group have operated with impunity out of Wiesbaden, in Hesse, Germany. Never monitored – even when they established a youth movement in 2000 – their activities go hardly noticed by press and police alike.

The LaRouche/ Bueso youth sell publications and recruit outside European and American colleges and Universities. They encourage students to abandon their studies in order to work solely for the LaRouche organization.

In 1994, the Bueso party (Germany’s LaRouchite political party) was described in the Bundestag as a political sect.

Disaffected families receive no support from the authorities; to date, they have had no channel to voice their grievances. They stand alone fearing reprisals by the LaRouchites; for when they speak out, they risk losing contact with their sons or daughters. Victimized families, like the youth targeted by the LaRouche organization, are subjugated by a conspiracy of silence.

In March 2003, Jeremiah Duggan, a 22 year British student studying in Paris, traveled to Germany, unaware that the seemingly-legal protest event he was attending was recruiting grounds for the LaRouche Group. Within five days of his visit, Jeremiah died in mysterious circumstances. To date, the Wiesbaden Prosecution has refused all requests to look into the events surrounding Jeremiah’s violent death.

Police in Germany quickly dismissed the death of Jeremiah Duggan as a “suicide”. Yet Jeremiah’s body was found close to EIR offices in Erbenheim (Executive Intelligence Review is located in Erbenheim, Weisbaden, which is the LaRouche organization's press headquarters). Moreover, this suspicious death follows a LaRouche conference and cadre school, although the authorities have shown little interest in whether or not Jeremiah was the victim of physical or psychological abuse. They have expressed even less interest in whether or not his being Jewish and British – in the company of LaRouche members long demonizing both – had anything to do with his death.

LaRouche is a convicted felon and fraudster. Yet he is allowed to set up conferences and recruit European youth to fascistic youth groups in Germany. After LaRouche’s imprisonment in the United States in January 1989 with a 15 year sentence for fraud, perjury and perverting the course of justice, he was released after in 1994, after serving only a third of his sentence.

Good character testimonies helped to
facilitate LaRouche's appeal for early release from prison. Later, in 2003,
LaRouche travelling to Germany to hold a rally for 500 LaRouche supporters
in Hesse; calling upon the young to turn their back on their education and
their families. Instead they were instructed that they needed to follow
LaRouche, as the only one who could prevent the world from being destroyed
in a Manichean struggle between Good and Evil.

Young recruits were crowded into flats, paid little for their work and told what to read, do, and to think. LaRouche’s German wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, heads the Schiller Institute, Bueso and EIR. Employing fear, shame and guilt, young people are manipulated into losing the ability for critical thought.

Members are then fed lies, conspiracy theories and misinformation; for example, LaRouche tells youths he was not guilty of fraud and he was wrongfully convicted; that September 11th was planned by a special division of the United States Pentagon; that there is a international conspiracy of Jewish bankers controlling the world; and that Zionists and their British supporters are planning to destroy the world if they cannot continue to control it.

Thus, under a smokescreen of high culture, music, poetry and the arts, youthful ideals are manipulated into believing that the outside world lies to them, and that only LaRouche and his organization has access to the truth.

Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, has gathered extensive evidence that, LaRouche’s organization in Germany a central hub for the worldwide distribution of anti-Semitic literature. Berlet further notes: “The LaRouche organization is currently the world’s largest distributor of literature based on ‘coded anti-Semitism’, rooted in the false allegation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Furthermore, evidence of systematic incitement to hatred against the British and worldwide Jewry in LaRouche publications which started in the 1970’s continues unfettered to this day. Through their prime publishing outlets in Wiesbaden, the LaRouche group in Germany is responsible for racist propaganda, much of which is based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Dennis King, author of a political biography of Lyndon LaRouche, similarly argues: “Anti-Semitism lies at the core of LaRouche’s beliefs. He uses a mixture of hate and scorn; thinly -veiled euphemisms and conspiracy theories involving Jewish banking families.

His methods are to build up prominent Jews as symbolic hate figures, developing new forms of ‘blood libel’, and the concoction of the myth of an evil ‘oligarchy’ – also known as the ‘Zionist-British organism’, the ‘Venetian party’ or simply ‘the British’. This ‘oligarchy’ is the target of the LaRouche organization’s most violent abuse; naming them as utterly evil and parasitical.”

Dr Matthew Feldman, editor of Compass: Political Religions and Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton, has also commented: “The LaRouche organization advances seemingly ridiculous conspiracy theories – like the British royal House of Windsor heading the international drugs trade – to deflect journalistic, political and legal attention away from their very serious, very dangerous, revolutionary agenda.

As a number of scholars have noted, the LaRouche
organization may be considered a ‘neo-fascist’ movement driven by a totalitarian structure as well as by veiled anti-Semitism and racism, which are illegal in Germany.

It is disgraceful that German and European authorities have not investigated the consistently unlawful acts perpetrated by the LaRouchites, especially extending to their central propaganda arm, the Schiller Institute, a global hub for hatred. Nor has any satisfactory inquiry been undertaken regarding the still-unexplained death of Jeremiah Duggan in Weisbaden, Hesse.

That a young Jewish man died in contemporary
Germany after attending what amounts to a fascist movement in thin disguise
– should act as a start wake-up call: "We need to initiate a long-overdue
investigation of LaRouche and his entire organization."